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Gallerists to the People

Alex Tryon, a founder of Artsicle, studies works by Kenneth Wong during a studio tour in Gowanus, Brooklyn.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

ABOUT 90 minutes into a high-speed scouting expedition through the artists’ studios of Gowanus, Brooklyn, Alex Tryon paused. In a small subdivided studio taking part in an annual event known as the Gowanus Open Studios Tour, her eye fixed on some acrylic paintings of neon-colored plastic squirt guns. They had a weird presence, cheery but menacing.

Her partner, Scott Carleton, leaned over and said, conspiratorially, “I like the squirt guns.” Ms. Tryon whipped out her iPhone and began taking pictures. “That goes to the Twitter feed,” she said. “It lets people know the Artsicle team is out on the streets, and this is what we’re seeing.”

Artsicle is the ear-catching name for an offbeat venture, an online business that rents inexpensive art cheaply. Ms. Tryon, 26, and Mr. Carleton, 27, have taken aim at novice collectors with small budgets, limited art knowledge and no appetite for the intimidating atmosphere at many established art galleries.

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The Artsicle founders Scott Carleton and Alex Tryon in Gowanus, Brooklyn, on a studio tour.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

They are trying an end run around the gallery system, an idea that has enticed a number of entrepreneurs recently. This spring, Artify It began offering an art subscription service, on the Netflix model, in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

“I thought the art market was ready for innovation and disruption,” said Idan Cohen, one of several investors who put a total of $390,000 into Artsicle last November. “I thought that Artsicle could reach young people not exposed to the art world yet, but who still want something that looks good in their home, to which they have an emotional attachment, that has a story behind it.”

Ms. Tryon knows their predicament. Just a few years ago, she went shopping for a print by Jock Sturges, known for his photographs of adolescents and their families taken at California communes and nudist colonies.

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Scott Carleton, her co-founder, tours the studio of the artist Thya Merz.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

She got nowhere fast. “The galleries made it very clear that they were not very interested in a young buyer with a budget of $1,000,” she said. “I encountered a lot of attitude everywhere I went. At the same time, I met a lot of young people interested in art. There seemed like a disconnect, an inefficiency in the market.”

“Inefficiency in the market” is business code for “moneymaking opportunity.” Ms. Tryon thought of creating an online business that was inexpensive and accommodating, what she calls a “Zappos for art.”

Mr. Carleton became her unlikely partner in the venture. The two met when she was studying communications and art history at the University of Pennsylvania and he was majoring in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. On a weekend trip to Philadelphia with a classmate, he ended up sleeping on Ms. Tryon’s couch. “Uninvited,” she pointed out.

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Ms. Tryon and Mr. Carleton.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A long-distance relationship developed. After college, Mr. Carleton found engineering work in the nuclear division of Westinghouse Electric. Ms. Tryon, whose nickname is short for Alexis, was hired by American Express, where her liaison work with top Manhattan restaurants dovetailed with her and Mr. Carleton’s enthusiasm for good food, craft beers and fancy cocktails. The couple have taken a solemn vow to eat at the world’s 50 best restaurants by the age of 50. (The tally so far: four.)

The relationship became short-distance when Mr. Carleton got out of the nuclear-reactor business, moved to New York, rented an apartment with Ms. Tryon and plunged into Web site development.

To test his code-writing skills, he badly needed a real-life Web project, something like Ms. Tryon’s art scheme, which had no name until Mr. Carleton spontaneously blurted out “Artsicle” while driving on a freezing winter day.

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Navigating the tour map.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The word means nothing in particular, but the two partners thought it sounded friendly and fun. “I knew it was good when someone told me, ‘I don’t remember your name but I do remember Artsicle,’ ” Mr. Carleton said.

The first version, with work by 10 artists, was unveiled in December 2010, but within a few weeks the two partners decided to shift the emphasis to renting rather than selling. The business began to gain traction.

In the early days, the company shipped about 30 works a month. That number is closer to 100 today, as business clients have signed on. The roster of artists has grown to 150, with 3,000 works in the online inventory, most of them small- to medium-size paintings.

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Ms. Tryon with a work by Kit Warren.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

New users go to the company’s Web site, at artsicle.com, and start by taking a visual quiz that offers clues to their taste. After they click on images of cars, kitchens and landscapes, a magic curator somewhere in the cyberdepths assembles a portfolio of works that are likely to please.

“The art you like has nothing to do with your social set and your friends,” said Ms. Tryon, who refined her quiz by e-mailing questions and sample art to the site’s most active users. “I found that the questions ‘What did you do last weekend?’ and ‘What kind of couch do you have?’ were the most closely correlated to art taste.”

Clients who rent pay $25 to $65 a month, depending on the size of the work. After living with the art for a while, they can renew the rental, trade in the old for the new or take the plunge and buy, usually for $500 to $2,500. Shipping is free.

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From left Mr. Carleton; Artsicle’s creative director, Dan Teran; and Ms. Tryon; with the artist Kevin Beers during the Gowanus Open Studios art walk in Brooklyn.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

“It lets you live with a piece of art that you would not give a chance to otherwise,” said Alexandra Portnova, a 31-year-old software developer who lives in Williamsburg and rented a painting six months ago. “In New York, there’s limited wall space, and this is a way to enjoy and look without making a commitment.”

Artsicle keeps 50 percent of the rental price, and 30 percent of sales, compared with the 50 percent typical at most galleries.

Artsicle is not Amazon. It has a grand total of six employees, three of them part-time. They toil in a small office on Broadway just north of 26th Street, where their neighbors down the hall include the Mystery Writers of America and PetFlow, an online pet-food delivery service.

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From left, Mr. Teran, Ms. Tryon and Mr. Carleton on Second Avenue in Brooklyn.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

After raising new capital, Ms. Tryon and Mr. Carleton hired Dan Teran, 23, to cultivate new artists and run the Artsicle blog. With a degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins, he was not the obvious choice. But since moving to New York, he had infiltrated the art and fashion worlds by assisting his photographer roommate at runway shows.

Mr. Teran carries the title of creative director, but at Artsicle, titles are pretty much meaningless. When clients ring the customer-service line, anyone with a free hand answers the phone.

The Artsicle team constantly trolls neighborhoods like Bushwick and Gowanus in Brooklyn, or Long Island City in Queens, indulging in marathon look-fests when events like Go Brooklyn or the Gowanus tour expose hundreds of artists to view.

Williamsburg is pretty much finished as hunting ground, they agreed. “Surprisingly, Bushwick is getting a little bit snobby,” Mr. Teran said. On the plus side, Red Hook is starting to show promise.

Sometimes, they can make a discovery right at home. A few years ago, while bartending at an auction to benefit Figment, an art project, Mr. Carleton and Ms. Tryon put in a winning $400 bid for a painting by Jon Coffelt, their first joint purchase. “We found him a week ago, and now we’re trying to get him on the site,” Mr. Carleton said. Mr. Coffelt signed with Artsicle on Monday.

Most of the time, the Artsicle team sees bad art. A lot of bad art. Acres and acres of it. Despite this, Ms. Tryon does not flag. She has an easy social manner, an ultradiscreet nose stud and the ability to seem pleased by everything she sees, regardless.

“I can go all day,” she said, as she cruised past a porcupine sculpture made from genuine Montana roadkill. She pointed to a wall densely populated with semiabstract acrylics. “Now here’s something we are really short on,” she said. “And they come in nice sizes.”

The three Artsiclers huddled over the official Gowanus route map, plotting the next move in a building-to-building trek that would last several more hours.

“I like these open studios around Halloween,” Ms. Tryon said, reaching for one of the free treats offered by most artists. “You get lots of candy.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 25, 2012, on page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gallerists to the People. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe